Let鈥檚 be honest: Without dressing, salad is little more than rabbit food. But a great salad dressing can elevate even the most humble ingredients, and there are no dressings easier to create and with more potential variations than vinaigrettes.
Suitable for both green and pasta salads, sometimes used as聽a聽marinade for meat and capable of being served warm or聽cold, a vinaigrette 鈥� from the French 鈥渧inaigre,鈥� literally meaning sour wine 鈥� is basically just a聽sauce made with oil and vinegar, plus maybe a little sweetener, some herbs, pepper and other flavourings.
In his cooking classes about salads, the first instruction George Geary gives students is: 鈥淭hrow out the old bottles of dressing.
鈥淚 look at all those ingredients in commercial dressings and they鈥檙e just crazy,鈥� says the California-based food educator, TV host and author of nine cookbooks, including 2010鈥檚 350 Best Salads & Dressings.
鈥淣ot that I鈥檓 a health-crazy person, but I don鈥檛 even know what a lot of those things are. And commercial dressings last for months and months. That scares me.鈥�
With homemade, 鈥渢hey don鈥檛 have any preservatives in them and you know what is going into the dressing.鈥�
Dietitian Andrea Miller of Whitby, Ont., agrees.
Flavour, nutrition and cost are all compelling reasons to make your own vinaigrettes, says the spokeswoman for Dietitians of Canada.
With homemade, 鈥測ou can add whatever ingredients you want to complement a salad and based on personal tastes.鈥�
Nutritionally, 鈥測ou get to choose what and how much goes in it, versus a store-bought one, where the manufacturer gets to choose. It allows you to modify the nutritional profile of your salad dressing based on your own nutrition goals,鈥� says Miller.
Cost-wise, it can be much less expensive to make your own, she adds.
The most daunting task for cooks new to vinaigrettes may be聽narrowing the choice of ingredients.
Geary used a total of 14 oils and vinegars in the recipes in his books. But he always starts with the basic ratio of two parts oil to one part vinegar.
鈥淚f you鈥檙e doing it for the first time, red-wine vinegar is probably the best to get,鈥� he suggests.
And it doesn鈥檛 have to be the most expensive brand.
The type of oil is a matter of聽taste. Geary sometimes prefers聽to use a nut oil 鈥� peanut, walnut or pistachio 鈥� for a pasta salad.
鈥淚f I want to stay on kind of a neutral plane with my dressing, I鈥檒l go with the canola,鈥� which has a mild taste and allows the other flavours to shine. Extra-virgin olive oil can be used as long as the cook remembers its taste may dominate the dressing.
Geary doesn鈥檛 always add a sweetener to his vinaigrette, but if he feels it needs a boost, he might add a sprinkling of sugar with his fingers, especially with apple cider vinaigrettes.
Like Miller, he uses fresh herbs when making an infusion but dried herbs when making the vinaigrette itself.
鈥淔resh herbs don鈥檛 give as much flavour and you have to use more.
鈥淭ake a basil leaf. Even if you slice it correctly, it still gets brown and you can鈥檛 get it fine enough. So it doesn鈥檛 look that good in a dressing. The same thing with peppers.鈥�
